My Racial Awakening

The following account is entirely factual, but I have left out names and places so as to protect identities.

The Trauma

I am not Christopher Newsome. I am not Stephen Pitcairn. I am not Kevin Kless. But I came just inches from ending up just like all three of them—whites killed by blacks because of the color of our skin. This is the story of my racial awakening.

In the fall of 2006 I was about one week into my junior year of college. I was returning home from a fraternity party with two of my white friends at about 1:45 in the morning. We were heading through the largely white, “safer” part of town that bordered campus. After walking about eight blocks, we were less than a block from my apartment, and exactly one block from school grounds, when I noticed a car idling in the street.

Before I could process what was going on, a young black man hopped out and headed towards the three of us. A larger, darker-skinned man hung back by the idling vehicle. The approaching stranger brandished a gun in our faces while demanding our “(expletive) money.” One of my two friends immediately sprinted down the street and got away unscathed. My other friend emptied his pockets, and I pulled out my new $200 cell phone and handed it to the gunman. I opened up my wallet, and forked over twenty dollars cash, the only currency I had. “Give me your whole (expletive) wallet,” the robber demanded. I complied. The young black guy, gun in hand, turned around and walked briskly back to the car and got in. I was shocked, but thought I was safe. I was wrong.

As his accomplice got into the driver’s seat, the gunman opened the passenger side door and fired four successive shots from about fifteen to twenty feet away before the car sped off. Three of them missed.

I felt a sharp burn rip through my midsection, and as I slumped to the ground all I remember was hearing my friend shriek in a high-pitched voice: “Oh my God! Oh my God! He got shot!” I lost consciousness.

About nine hours later I woke up in a hospital with doctors, my parents, and my sister at my bedside. I was doped up on morphine, and was not in much pain. As I came to, the doctors explained to me that I had undergone surgery to repair the bullet wound. The bullet had ripped through my bladder, but missed all my vital organs. I would survive. The only permanent damage would be a ten-inch surgical scar down the center of my stomach, and a button-sized scar where the bullet had entered. The surgeon had decided to leave the bullet, which was lodged in my left femur, inside my body. It would have been a major risk to attempt extraction, the doctors explained. The bullet remains there to this day.

I spent one week in the hospital, where my parents, sister, cousins, then-girlfriend, and various classmates visited frequently. It rained every day I was there. The school president stopped by several times, as did various detectives from the police department. After some light physical therapy I was released from the hospital with a catheter inside my body.

During my time in the hospital and shortly after my release, the school president, my father, and others put a lot of pressure on me to stay at the college. I agreed to do so, but continued the fall 2006 semester with two courses instead of the usual four. The rest of my junior year was typical of an irresponsible college student—though it had a different purpose for me. I smoked marijuana almost daily, drank heavily a couple times per week, and had sex often. This dulled my emotions, clouded my mind, and delayed my confrontation with the difficult realities I would eventually face.

As the weeks and months rolled by, there was no word of my attackers. A cash reward, which was eventually raised to $25,000, was offered for information leading to an arrest. A couple of leads surfaced, but they hit dead ends. The college and the police seemed to be pursuing the case aggressively, as it was not typical drug-dealer-on-drug-dealer violence. As far as anybody knew, mine was the first known shooting of a student in the two-century history of the university.

I didn’t develop a perspective on race for the first year and a half after I was attacked. Though of course I was aware of the color of the man who shot me, if I thought about it at all I adopted the mentality that my assailant “just happened to be black.” There was only one incident where I seemed to notice race, albeit briefly, and it occurred sometime during the spring of 2007. There was a black student who had shown some interest in the girl I was dating, and that didn’t sit well with me. Driving in the car with her, I noticed him walking across one of the streets onto campus. Struck by a bit of rage, I blurted out a certain racial profanity, and my then-girlfriend quickly let me know that my comment was unacceptable. On reflection, I see that as one minor isolated incident. I still didn’t understand race at all.

In the fall of 2007, I began my senior year with a semester abroad in Paris, France. It was in the City of Lights where I started to take baby-steps toward the truth. In Paris, I didn’t use marijuana frequently. I took frequent walks around the city to see its different sections. One of the last arrondissements (city wards) I explored in Paris was the 20th. I noticed darker faces in this district, and I realized that I certainly didn’t feel as comfortable as I did elsewhere in the city. The 20th was represented in the 1980s by Jean-Marie Le Pen of the Front National, whom I had made the focus of a large research project for one of my classes that semester.

I came back from Paris in December with by far the best GPA of any I had in four years of college. I was shocked when I landed in New York and saw so many obese and overweight people. It occurred to me that I had seen maybe three or four fat people during my entire four-month stay in Western Europe. In America, they were everywhere. While this was not a racial observation, it was a sign that I was beginning to see the world in different ways.

The Awakening

In January of 2008, I plunged back into life on campus for my final semester, and reverted to my old bad habits. Toward the end of the semester, I started carrying a knife when I was on the city streets. But the defining moment that shook my life and led to my racial awakening came from an unlikely source: Michael Moore.

During the 18 months between the shooting and my awakening, I was convinced that the problem was firearms. I grew up in a deep-Blue state where guns were very rare. My family never owned a gun, and I had seen a gun only once in my life before the night I was shot. In the months immediately following the incident, I looked up statistics on gun violence in the U.S., and compared them to the lower rates in Europe. Guns were the problem, I concluded, and if America could just rid itself of these awful weapons, many horror stories like mine could have been avoided.

It was during the first or second week of spring when my then-girlfriend and I ordered the critically-acclaimed Michael Moore documentary Bowling for Columbine on Netflix. I had seen Mr. Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 and since I was a Bush supporter at the time, I gave the movie low marks.

Bowling for Columbine purports to examine the reasons for high levels of American gun violence, and puts much blame on the National Rifle Association. Mr. Moore frequently uses our neighbor Canada for the purpose of comparison.

Canadians own firearms but have rates of gun crime that are substantially lower than ours. Mr. Moore can’t seem to figure out why. He asks various New Yorkers why they think Canada is so safe compared to the USA. One astute young lady replies, “I think there are mostly white people in Canada.” Mr. Moore scoffs at this and claims that he sees “black people everywhere” when he’s in Canada. He proceeds to point out that “13 percent of the country is non-white, so the Canadians are pretty much just like us.”

After the movie, I decided to do some research, and was startled by what I found. Mr. Moore had lied, or had certainly misled his audience. I found out that Canada was 2.6 percent black, while the United States was 12.5 percent black. I found that America was over 30 percent non-white, compared to Canada’s 13 percent. I began to connect the dots.

By the end of that evening, and as a result of some Google searches, I found my way to a website called AmRen.com. I read a handful of the articles near the top of the page, as well as some of the comments. I quickly became hooked. My eyes had been opened to a wealth of hidden information, stories, and statistics. But more than that, my entire perspective on life changed that night. With one major jolt, I had completed the transformation into the realm of race realism. Indeed, my life has never been the same since.

My Life as a Race Realist

In the final stages of my racial awakening, a little-known black Senator from Illinois announced he would run for US President. As Barack Obama’s association with his pastor Jeremiah Wright became national news, I called my father in a panic. He is a devout Republican, and said I shouldn’t worry that Mr. Obama might become president, since his poll numbers had plummeted in the wake of the Jeremiah Wright revelations. We know how that turned out.

For various reasons I spent 2009 in South America. Although I was living in a country with few blacks and a much lower homicide rate than the United States, I was robbed three times and severely beaten once. I was clearly singled out because of my white skin and because of the assumption that I was from the United States. Needless to say, this only strengthened my views on the importance of race. I became certain that race would inform virtually every decision I make in life going forward.

I now live a calculated, careful life because of my beliefs. I am cautious about what I say and who I say it to. At work, I mute my observations in order to keep my job. This is all the more necessary because I work in the same office as a black man. On the streets, I am always on guard.

In my first months as a race realist, I started investigating which US cities were the most dangerous, and which had the highest percentage of blacks. Now, I look at the racial breakdowns of census tracts, and avoid black and Hispanic neighborhoods whenever possible. I pore over homicide maps, police alerts, and city body counts. I work in a city that is half black, and I never go into that part of town. I have a concealed carry permit and I carry my pistol wherever and whenever I can.

I have met and become friends with like-minded white men and women, with whom I can speak my mind. I have learned that everybody has his own story on how he became conscious of race. I met one man who started down the road to race realism because he was beaten by a group of blacks, but he and I are exceptions. The overwhelming majority came to their conclusions through observation, because they were raised that way, or through a combination of both. Though I haven’t met another white racialist who was converted by a black-on-white shooting, I’m sure there are people like that out there, and I would love to find them.

I am fortunate to have a girlfriend who understands my outlook, and though she is not as committed or outspoken as I am, she supports me and rarely takes issue with what I have to say. I also discuss race with my parents, and though I sometimes make them a bit uncomfortable, they are willing to listen.

Like most race realists, I live a life not very different from that of Winston in George Orwell’s 1984. I try to help others see the light. I worry about the safety of my brothers, sister, cousins, parents, grandparents, and friends. I try to use my experience to help them avoid what happened to me. I wonder if they will ever understand, and see the world as I do.

I am not John Sanderson. I am not Marley Lion. I am not Jason Befort. You probably do not know those names, but they were all killed by blacks. I am fortunate to be alive. My white racial identity will always play a major role in my life, and the preservation of the white race is my ultimate goal.

None of this would have happened, had it not been for those two black men who helped me see the truth back in 2006.

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About Jason Daugherty

Mr. Daugherty studied history at the University of Cincinnati. He lives in Baltimore County, Maryland, and enjoys golf and hiking.

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